Remembering eight weeks of signal corps basic training in the spring of 1953 at Ft. Hood, Texas-- our first sergeant, a crusty WWII and Korean War veteran, advised us before our bivouac week “Shake your sleeping bags before you get in them. The rattlesnakes here mate only in the spring and often crawl into rolled-up ‘fartsacks’!” A comical fellow recruit from Baltimore, a rotund inner-city kid, rolled his eyes and exclaimed “Man, I’d be ready to attack, too, if I only tried to mate once a year and got interrupted!”